I’m always messing about with baits; it’s so creative and fun to catch lots of good fish on baits they have never seen before! I do spenfd a fair bit of time in the kitchen and garden shed making new baits for wide ranging situations and purposes. (I even make my own flapjacks too!) Making instant carp and catfish baits that really work can be very easy and simple without the need for too much technical know-how! Fishermen go on about ‘nutritional attraction baits’ versus ‘flavoured attractor baits’ versus ‘fake and plastic baits’ and so on and the difference in the prices of these baits can be enormous. But who cares what you use as long as it’s safe, does the fish no harm and really catches you fish! Here’s a few ‘alternative’ tit-bits on making baits that will catch you fish.

Your local stores can provide all you need but you can use specialist fishing additives and attractor ingredients too. Very easy baits for carp and catfish of many species and sub-species often utilise the same ingredients to stimulate the fish which makes things simple.

(You can make yourself some flapjacks, brownies or cinnamon scones while you’re at it if so inclined, all the ingredients you need for these are eggs, self raising flour, sugar, salt, margarine and a raising agent like bicarbonate of soda.) Making these things is a great fun way to practice making good palatable baits for starters! As a side note, have you noticed how addictive ‘Marmite’ or ‘Vegemite’ (yeast extract spread) on toast with lashings of butter’ is? Unfortunately it makes you feel dehydrated and maybe keen to have a drink - more than likely a caffeine, milk and sugar containing coffee or tea drink or alocoholic beverage to wash it down?

This is just to remind you how easy it is to get our body and mind in a particular state just by eating a simple snack or a ‘simple’ beverage. In fact these foods and drinks are popular because they are literally addictive. Once you’ve been having these for long enough, giving them up is something your body and mind can have trouble with and even give you withdrawal symptoms!

From the monosodium glutamate and salt in the ‘Marmite,’ to the opiates in the wheat flour, butter and milk, these foods have strong impacts on your body and mind. Even the fat in the butter and milk, the powerful effects of the caffeine in the beverages and even the sugar and its powerful taste enhancing effects leave you wanting more...

You really want your catfish and carp baits to be like this and it is easily achievable, especially by exploiting the high-tech refined specialist bait ingredients available today. However much more simple baits can offer a level of this effect too using ingredients from your average kitchen.

You can make a wide range of successful baits by using soya powder or meal and semolina as the basic dry powder mixture, but corn flour and wheat flour can be used too as base ingredients to make paste or dough baits or even boilies, but be sure to use ‘plain flour’ rather than the ‘self-raising’ types. Your base mix powder may not be very ‘nutritionally attractive’ at this point but this is easily remedied as you will see... Your baits do not have to be high protein wonder baits to catch big fish. Even these marvels can ‘blow’ and become less effective after fish have been caught on them enough times. In fact very simple carbohydrate type baits with a couple of added special ingredients to effect the fish in powerful ways are often enough to tempt the biggest fish. But you need to know what ingredients affect fish the way you want...

Can you imagine what adding an alcohol flavour does to you bait and how it affects the fish? What about garlic; what’s really going on there? Why is liver and blood so effective? What about the effects of betaine, green lip mussel extract, or honey, molasses or brown sugar? Knowing about these type of effects on the fish might seem irrelevant, or are they?

For pastes or dough baits, just add water, or eggs to help binding and bait durability. The usual number of eggs used per pound of dry mixture is 4 per pound of dry mix to 6 per kilogram of dry mix. Added eggs will enable you to make skinned steamed or boiled baits too if preferred.

Baits with added eggs will have a higher protein level than those with water and when rolled into balls can be boiled in water or steamed in a pan to make them form a resistant coagulated skin which makes the baits last longer. You will discover that experimentation is the key to making baits and recording the amounts and ingredients you use will really pay you back especially when you want to re-make that ‘bagging bait’ and have forgotten what it contained!

You can do a short-cut by buying prepared cooking pastry mix. This is attractive because of its sugar salt, fat and wheat content, all of which can be pretty addictive and it can work well on carp, but needs more ingredients to get the catfish biting.

You can make it that much better by rolling it out and liberally spreading peanut butter and yeast extract, like ‘Marmite’ or ‘Vegemite’ onto it, but the list you can add is endless. Liquidized chicken liver or pork liver are classic examples as are shad guts and chicken blood from a friendly butcher. However, Blood powder, liver powder and squid powder, fermented shrimp powder, shrimp and krill meal,

It may sound simplistic, but for example, yeast extract contains lots of attractive salts with those used in its production, enzymes, such as trypsin (the protein digesting enzyme,) soluble proteins, amino acids, peptides, minerals, trace elements, vitamins like B6 and B12, carnitine, chitin, yeast extract is also a major source of the infamous food enhancer monosodium glutamate for the food industry. It is also water-attracting being hygroscopic (like honey and malt extract and peptones interestingly,) and is highly soluble a digestible. Peanut butter has much going for it too including sugar, salt, high fat content, tasty oils and great palatability and even its own highly fish attractive enzymes. There are very good reasons why even the ‘simplest’ kitchen ingredient works.

The attractiveness of peanuts and peanut products is so well known, but fewer fishermen realise that crushed peanuts make great ground bait and cook-up well absorbing all kinds of added attractors like sugars, salts, flavours, spices, essential oils, colours and so on. Peanut oil is another great attractor too, while de-fatted roasted peanut meals can have a protein content above that of many fishmeals and are very well consistently proven fish catchers.

Getting back to your easy simple bait, a generous amount of molasses or brown sugar will really help. Many fishes love sweet smells and tastes and a quick energy ‘hit’ from the sugars is appreciated too. In fact ‘polysaccharides’ play a big part in wild fishes natural diet and are derived from ingesting mussels and shrimps and other shelled organisms.

It’s a good idea to add a bit of protein to your simple flours baits. Fish can are very drawn to attractive proteins, amino acids, polypeptides and this has been consistently proven with catfish and carp etc. In fact, often the baits meant for carp or catfish end up catching other big specimens of other species including bass, big pike and tench, pickerels, eels and so on. Adding liver powder or mashed-up tinned fish, ground trout pellet powder, or any of a range of fish meals and meat meals, shellfish meals and milk powders will all make a big difference to your simple bait’s effectiveness. You can even add ground-up sinking pond pellets if you want to really ensure your fish get a guaranteed ‘balanced meal’ if you’re so inclined.

You could mix in large amounts of flaked cold-water fish food which is a very effective edge in making a very ‘alternative’ bait. These are high in things like spirulina, carotenes, complex sugars and daphnia. (All good stuff.) Incorporating casein and whey protein body-building powders into your simple flour or pastry mix really is an edge adding much recommended ‘free amino acids’ among a huge list of other beneficial attractors.

Many fishermen feel they need a boost of extra confidence by adding a flavour to their bait. While there are a handful of ‘giants’ than really shine through in the world of fishing flavours, just a few drops of butyric acid will do the trick. Even adding fresh juice from red or blue fruits like strawberry, mulberry, blueberry, acai berry etc adds great flavour and very powerful fish attracting acids, enzymes, flavours, sugars etc.

Even adding flavours at levels we cannot detect ourselves will work. E.g. half a teaspoonful per kilogram of bait. It is also a fact that many baits have proven to work without any added flavours at all. The best flavours are probably better called ‘fish detection tools’ or even ‘fish mood and activity changers.’ This is a far cry from the simple cake flavours many beginners start off using. The proven catches difference between using a simple alcohol based vanilla flavour compared to a fishing bait proprietary brand flavour proven for decades like ‘Scopex’ or ‘Tutti Fruitti’ or ‘Monster crab’ is gigantic.

Experiment kneading the mixture together into a dough. Until you have a practical bait and put into marked and dated bags, but many of these baits can quickly be made on the bank or boat which is really useful. Baits can be round shapes, square, triangles, pellets or just random shapes. You can use these baits fresh or store them temporarily in the fridge or freeze them. By noting what ingredients you add and the amounts used you will be able to make any bait in the future and associate with it any interesting results apart from personal best captures. Just putting bait into the margins where fish can browse on your baits is a very valuable thing to do to help assess their response.

Personally I’d do this with any batch of bait before bothering to fish. Watching fish feeding on your bait is fantastic. (And often the biggest fish are caught on a new bait they have never experienced before.) Testing different batches of bait like this will certainly show you the winners and dramatically increase your confidence in your new baits. You will find that some of your homemade baits will out-perform those expensive shop-bought baits and by making your own baits you will learn practical ways to enhance or alter those shop baits that are ‘in’ too in order to ‘top’ them. Although there is far more to making and enhancing baits this will get you on your way!

By Tim Richardson.